Ambiguous Adjectives and Unqualified Lesbians

It was the semantic subtlety and sophistication, as much as the political repartee, that appealed to me so much about the recent “unqualified lesbian” brouhaha.

Cynthia Nixon, best known for playing Miranda Hobbes in Sex and the City, has announced she is running for governor of New York State, and Christine Quinn, who has at least some political experience (she has served as speaker of the New York City Council), showed open contempt for the idea that an actor who has never run any kind of organization should be in the running for a major executive job like running the Empire State.

Since 2012, Nixon has been married to a woman, Christine Marinoni. And Quinn is also married to a woman, Kim Catullo. But in 2013 when Quinn ran in the primary for mayor of New York City, politics was not dictated by sexual-orientation solidarity. Nixon failed to endorse Quinn, backing Bill de Blasio instead. And when Nixon announced her candidacy for governor, Quinn said this to the press on March 20:

Nixon immediately tweeted about this statement, feigning misunderstanding:

It’s a cute joke. I smiled, as I think millions of others did. But as a qualified linguistics nerd I can’t resist using my X-ray vision to to perceive the skeletal structure of language-based humor. I notice that the feigned misunderstanding is based on rather subtle aspects of the semantics of unqualified.

There is a familiar test, much discussed in the literature of philosophy (especially ethics) as well as in syntax and semantics, for normal attributive adjectives of the type that The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language calls ascriptive. When you say “It is a X Y,” filling in some adjective for X and some common noun for Y, does it entail “It is a Y?

From This is a good plan you can validly infer This is a plan. From This is a sharp knife you can validly infer This is a knife. So good and sharp are ascriptive adjectives. But from This is a fake gun you cannot validly infer This is a gun. From This is a putative theorem you cannot validly infer This is a theorem. So fake and putative are, anomalously, not ascriptive.

The adjective unqualified is ambiguous, and manages to be both an ascriptive adjective and an anomalous one.

Syntactically, what’s relevant is that unqualified can take a complement: either a preposition phrase (unqualified for the role of governor) or an infinitival clause (unqualified to serve as
governor). But the complement is optional. Semantically, the word denotes a relational concept: it means “lacking the qualifications required for some role R.” And pragmatically there are two ways to figure out what to assume as the R: It can be specified explicitly by the complement, if there is one, or it can be provided implicitly by the meaning of the modified noun. Context decides.

So if I say the provost has appointed an unqualified nonentity as dean, I obviously mean the appointee is not qualified for a deanship (not qualified as a nonentity). But when I talk about an unqualified pilot, I probably mean that the person has no valid flying license.

So Cynthia Nixon’s joke was based on pretending she didn’t see that unqualified was meant to pick up its R from the context. She affected to think that the R had to be supplied by the modified noun, lesbian. Thence the whimsical picture of a Department of Lesbian Affairs issuing forms and requiring examinations of competency for women planning to love women.

This completely sidestepped of the question of being qualified to be a governor. But I imagine she thinks that the fairly successful careers of Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger as governors of California have permanently settled the issue of whether an actor could possibly handle such a job. That is not even up for discussion.

The story continues, and I will follow it with relish. At the time of writing this, Nixon has already started issuing “Unqualified Lesbian” buttons and T-shirts.